Suchergebnisse

Abstract

Introduction
Existing asthma-specific job-exposure matrices (JEMs) do not necessarily reflect current working conditions in the USA and do not directly function with occupational coding systems commonly used in the USA. We initiated a project to modify an existing JEM to address these limitations, and to apply the new JEM to the entire US employed population to estimate quantitatively the extent of probable work-related asthma exposures nationwide.


Methods
We started with an asthma-specific JEM that was developed for northern Europe (the N-JEM) and modified it to function with the 2010 US Standard Occupational Classification (SOC-2010) codes and to reflect working conditions in the USA during the post-2000 period. This involved cross walking from the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88) codes used in the N-JEM to the SOC-2010 codes, transferring the N-JEM exposure assignments to the SOC-2010 codes, and modifying those assignments to reflect working conditions in the USA. The new US asthma JEM (USA-JEM) assigns exposures to 19 agents organized into five categories. The USA-JEM and N-JEM were applied to the same sample of working adults with asthma to compare how they performed, and the USA-JEM was also applied to the entire 2015 US working population to estimate the extent of occupational asthma exposures nationally.


Results
The USA-JEM assigns at least one asthma-related probable exposure to 47.5% and at least one possible exposure to 14.9% of the 840 SOC-2010 detailed occupations, and 9.0% of the occupations have both probable exposure to at least one agent and possible exposure to at least one other agent. The USA-JEM has greater sensitivity for cleaning products, highly reactive disinfectants and sterilants, and irritant peak exposures than the N-JEM. When applied to the entire 2015 US working population, the USA-JEM determined that 42.6% of workers had probable exposure to at least one type of occupational asthma agent.


Discussion
A new asthma-specific JEM for application in the USA was developed. Additional work is needed to compare its performance to similar JEMs and, if possible, to exposure assessments generated on a case-by-case basis.

Estimates of the number of workers in the United States occupationally exposed to beryllium were published in the 1970s and 1980s and ranged from 21,200 to 800,000. We obtained information from several sources to identify specific industries with beryllium exposure and to estimate the number of current workers potentially exposed to beryllium. We spoke with representatives from the primary beryllium industry and government agencies about the number of exposed workers in their facilities. To identify industries in the private sector but outside the primary industry, we used data from the Integrated Management Information System (IMIS), which is managed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Health Hazard Evaluation program of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. We used IMIS data from OSHA inspections with a previously developed algorithm to estimate the number of potentially exposed workers in nonprimary industries. Workers potentially exposed to beryllium included 1500 current employees in the primary beryllium industry and 26,500 individuals currently working for the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense. We identified 108 four-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories in which at least one measurement of airborne beryllium was ≥ 0.1 μ g/m3. Based on the subset of 94 SIC categories with beryllium ≥ 0.1 μ g/m3, we estimated 26,400 to 106,000 workers may be exposed in the private sector (outside the primary industry). In total, there are as many as 134,000 current workers in government and private industry potentially exposed to beryllium in the United States. We recommend that the results of this study be used to target at-risk audiences for hazard communications intended to prevent beryllium sensitization and chronic beryllium disease.